Hello ,

The holiday season is the ideal time to discover how you can shine like a star. What makes you sparkle? What do you need to shine brighter in 2016?

After the attacks in Paris, all of Europe is in shock and grieving, especially the music business. The second article tells you why it's important to conquer fear.

The third article is about self protection and why you have to protect yourself against toxic habits.

Enjoy the holidays :-)

Take care,
Hilde Spille

 

Index:

Shine like a star

Go out and conquer fear

Grip on Creativity (10 of 14): Self-Protection

Calendar

About Hilde Spille

Connect

 

Calendar

spring:
"Online workshop 5 empowerment tools for musicians - Learn in 6 weeks how to move from insecurity to an upward spiral towards success"
See here for more information.
The workshop is for max. 12 participants.

 

About Hilde Spille

Hilde Spille has worked at Paperclip Agency since 1995. As senior agent, she is booking Dutch and European tours for bands from all over the world. Names on her roster include(d) Chloe Charles, Jodymoon, Deleyaman, John Watts, Balkan Beat Box, I Muvrini.
Paperclip Agency, facebook

Hilde is now combining her rich experience in the live music business with her accumulated knowledge from her master's degree in Cultural Psychology and her interest in books about (personal) leadership. You can find the results in more than 100 posts on her blog Compass for Creatives, in the personal coaching of artists and in the workshops she developed (D.I.Y. Attitude, Grip on Creativity and more).
Compass for Creatives, facebook

 

Connect

Hilde Spille
Paperclip Agency
P.O. Box 1519
6501 BM  Nijmegen
the Netherlands
T +31.24.323 9322
e-mail, facebook, twitter, linkedin


If you like this newsletter, please feel free to forward it to anyone who you think might like it too.
Thank you.

© Hilde Spille


 

Shine like a star

 

Have you heard of winter-depression? Are you infected too? I can get quite down if the days are so short as they are right now. No wonder that the celebration of the winter solstice is so important in most Nordic cultures. It’s the start of the days getting longer again.

Many Christmas customs have their origin in the celebration of winter solstice in Nordic countries. Pines and pine branches stand for the hope of everything getting green again in spring. Candles stand for more (day) light. All the customs and traditions create the picture of a cozy home within a dark and cold environment. You want to enjoy the warm company of friends and family.

Long and dark nights are the ideal time to spot stars. The darker it is, the brighter the stars will sparkle, if you have a cloudless sky.  It might just as well be the ideal time for you to search for the sparkle inside you, the sparkle that you want to let shine in the coming months.

The sparkle I want to shine with, is my work with booking shows for new artists. And for Compass for Creatives I’m developing some new workshops. Exciting!

Come on and shine, shine like a star
Shining so bright like the star that you are.
Oh oh oh oh shine into the future
Spreading your light wherever you are.
(Aswad)

What’s your sparkle?
 

Go out and conquer fear

Everyone is shocked after the attacks in Paris. Now it's important to control our reaction. We have to conquer fear.

After the attacks in Paris, with 89 people being killed at a concert at Le Bataclan, everyone in the music business is shocked and grieved! And we react accordingly. Some Dutch venues have increased safety measures by using twice as much security people and searching every single visitor and his/her bag.  Prince is postponing his European tour.

The targeted attack on pop music affects us all. Music is important to us. Music can cross borders and connect people, even if they don’t understand each others language. Music is a very powerful tool, that’s probably why it is attacked by IS. It frightens me! And I have so many questions!

Will there be more attacks? Do ‘they’ (IS) care what kind of music it is? Are smaller venues safer than bigger ones? Will the audience still dare to go to shows? Will it still be fun to go to a show with all the extra security? How many fake alarms will we get? How many shows will be cancelled?

“The enemy is fear. We think it is hate, but it is fear.” (Mahatma Gandhi)

All the questions above do sound quite legit, still they are all caused by my fear. It’s the fear for new attacks and the fear for how others react to it. When fear rules our behavior, we want to protect ourselves or run away. There is no space for anything else. When scared, we put on winkers and don’t dare to look around us anymore. We interpret everything in order to confirm our fear. Prince is postponing his tour, see, there are already shows being cancelled! All the questions above are asked from the fear for more attacks and the fear for business. Instead, I could also look for the power of music!

When reigned by fear, every package in a bag will be suspicious; any visitor of a show might be a threat. And we will behave accordingly. Bands will keep a distance to the audience, the visitors will be distant and suspicious to other visitors.

Strangely enough, if we want to change the behavior of others, we can start with changing our behavior towards others. That’s what all the books of Dale Carnegie are about.

“If you want to conquer fear, don’t sit home and think about it. Go out and get busy.” (Dale Carnegie)

Let’s go out and conquer fear; let’s connect to each other, how ever strange or suspicious the other person might seem; let’s spread the power of music. There is no better answer to the attacks than this.

 

Grip on Creativity (10 of 14): Self-Protection

Self protection is about discovering the toxic patterns that block your creativity, and how to protect yourself against it. In other words: how can you protect yourself against yourself? In order to be kind to ourselves, we have to be hard against the toxic patterns.

Imagine that creativity is all around us, like leaves in the fall, available to everyone. We just have to bend over and pick it up. And often we just don’t want to bend over, we want that creative bursts to fly in our hands. We use every excuse we can so we don’t bend over to pick up creativity. All these excuses are the toxic patterns we have to fight.

Food, Work and Sex are great things to enjoy, though they also can become toxic to you. It starts, when you abuse them to run away from yourself, from your creativity. In order to gain control over your creativity – which can’t be controlled! – you might starve yourself with diets, or overeat. Either way it will block your creativity.

We often turn to addictions in the desire to block our creativity. Creativity is something that happens to you, you can’t control the outcome. And at times, that might appear pretty scary. So we turn to one of the best ways to block creativity: addictions. We think that our fears, uncertainties, insecurities are blocked too, but that’s an illusion. And the more fearful, uncertain and insecure we feel, the more we try to find the solution in the addiction. We feel victimized and don’t dare to regain leadership over ourselves. A vicious circle. The workshop 5 empowerment tools helps you to get out of this vicious circle!

Competition is also a well know toxic habit. We compare ourselves to other artists, and try to compete with them. When competing, we only take a very limited amount of criteria in the comparison, and there are always people who are better, faster, stronger, ahead of where we want to go. 

“As artists, we cannot afford to think about who is getting ahead of us and how they don’t deserve it. The desire to be better than can choke off the simple desire to be.” (Julia Cameron)

The best way of self protection is to be aware, to return to yourself, to discover your own path and enjoy the journey. Have fun with it!